China’s Farm Workers Population Hits 225 Million, Many Out of Work

A throng of farm workers goes to Guangdong Province looking for jobs. This photo was taken on Feb. 4, 2009 at the Guangzhou Train Station. (Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images)

According to BBCChinese.com, there are now 225 million farmer workers in China, according to a survey released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Among them are 140 million migrant workers.

Before the 2009 Chinese New Year, 70 million migrant workers returned home out of work. Now, 23 million are jobless, and 12 million out of these workers remain jobless in their hometowns, with only 70,000 considering going back to farming.

The international financial crisis has hit China’s eastern coast, where the economy is more developed than other areas. Among the migrant workers who returned home before the 2009 Chinese New Year, 62.4 percent were workers from the east coast, 24.6 percent from Guangdong Province and 17.2 percent from the Changjiang River Delta. The manufacturing and construction industries were the most severely affected as they have 46.2 percent and 73.3 percent workers who have returned home, out of work, respectively.

The survey indicates that 5.8 percent of migrant workers who returned home from their last work were not paid in-time or in full amount, and 8 percent of farm workers who are now jobless were not paid in-time or in full-amount. When the farm workers went back home, 2.2 percent of them had no more land to farm, as their farmlands have been rented, transferred or are now being managed by village authorities.